Friday, January 20, 2006

I'm sitting in the departure lounge of Edinburgh Airport logged onto the BT OpenZone, rather than the T-Mobile, wireless hotspot. I actually have a T-Mobile account and would have used their service, but the hotspot seems to be totally shot at the moment. It's even refusing to give me an IP address, let alone allow me to talk to the proxy so that I can get out onto the Internet, hence the fallback to BT.

Of course it's nice to have a fallback, it's not often you see competition between wireless providers. Normally providers lock venues into contracts where they insist on being the sole service provider. Although thinking about it, I'm not actually entirely sure I'm supposed to be on the BT OpenZone network, as I've a funny feeling that I'm in the spill over from the BA Executive Club lounge.

I've got a late flight, but I should be home before the plane is turned back into a pumpkin, so I guess that's alright...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.